Roundtable: Queer/Trans of Color Transits and the Imaginaries of Racial Capitalism

Şahin Açıkgöz is assistant professor of Islam, gender, and sexuality in the Department for the Study of Religion and a member of the executive committee of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program at the University of California, Riverside. They were a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in Religious Studies at UCR from 2020 to 2022. They received their PhD in comparative literature and LGBTQ studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where they cofounded the Transnational Gender and Sexuality Studies Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop and were the Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. They were also the recipient of the 2019 Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellowship in LGBT Studies at Yale University and the Holstein Dissertation Fellowship in Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion at UC Riverside. Their research areas are queer and trans studies in Islam; slavery, gender, and sexuality in Islamicate societies; trans of color critique; the Global South; transnational feminisms; and gender politics in the Middle East.

Howard Chiang is Lai Ho and Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan cultural studies, professor of East Asian languages and cultural studies, and director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of two prize-wining monographs: After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (2018) and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (2021). Between 2019 and 2022, he served as the founding chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies.

Debanuj DasGupta is assistant professor of feminist studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Debanuj's research and teaching focuses on racialized regulation of space, immigration detention, queer migrations, and the global governance of migration, sexuality, and HIV. Debanuj's scholarly work has been published in journals such as GLQ, Journal of Human Rights, Human Geography, Women's Studies in Communication, Disability Studies Quarterly, Contemporary South Asia, SEXUALITIES, Gender, Place and Culture, and the Scholar and the Feminist (S and F online). She is the co-editor of Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures 2002–2020; Friendship as Social Justice Activism: Critical Solidarities in Global Perspective, and Queering Digital India: Activisms, Identities and Subjectivities. Debanuj served as board cochair of the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York between 2017 and 2022. Prior to joining academia, Debanuj worked for over twenty years in movements for sexual liberation and migrant justice in both the US and India.

Joao Gabriel is a Guadeloupean writer, panafricanist, and PhD student in history. He is the author of Le Blog de Joao, which addresses issues regarding colonialism, gender, and the African diaspora, especially in the Caribbean. He is currently working on the history of prison in relation to the French abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century.

Christoph Hanssmann is assistant professor of gender, sexuality, and women's studies at the University of California, Davis. He studies the politics of health, science, and medicine, focusing on relationships between biomedicine and social movements. His first book, Care without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists are Changing Medicine (2023) examines trans- health as a transnationally emergent field and public good, and analyses social movement–driven depathologization in health care. He works collaboratively with researchers and activists in feminist, queer and transfeminist health and justice, and has published articles in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Social Science and Medicine.

Rana M. Jaleel is an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis, where she chairs the Graduate Group in Cultural Studies and is a Dean's Faculty Fellow as well as a Chancellor's Fellow. Her work examines the politics of evidence: how concepts like labor, sex/gender, race, and property are sustained or transformed through the recognition, narration, and redress of harm. Her book, The Work of Rape (2021), received a 2021 Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and was cowinner of the 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. Other academic work has been published in places like Amerasia, Critical Ethnic Studies, Social Text: Periscope, Cultural Studies, Syndicate, and The Brooklyn Law Review. Dr. Jaleel is part of the Critical Ethnic Studies journal's editorial collective. A longtime member of the American Association of University Professors, she presently serves on the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Durba Mitra is the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Mitra works at the intersection of feminist and queer studies. She is the author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (2020). Mitra's current book, The Future That Was (under contract with Princeton University Press), analyzes Third World feminist thought as anti-authoritarianism.

Evren Savcı is assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. Her first book, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021), analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey's AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism, and religion has appeared in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, Ethnography, Sexualities, Political Power and Social Theory, Theory and Event, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and GLQ. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Southern California. Following her PhD, she was a postdoctoral fellow at The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN).